actually make it, the Protestants soon discovered their impotence; the Duke of Bouillon, sixty-five years of age and crippled with gout, interceded for them in his letters to Louis XIII., but did not go out of Sedan; the Duke of Lesdiguieres, to whom the assembly had given the command of the Protestants of Burgundy, Provence, and Dauphiny, was at that very moment on the point of abjuring their faith and marching with their enemies.  Duke Henry of Rohan himself, who was the youngest, and seemed to be the most ardent, of their new chiefs, was for doing nothing and breaking up.  “If you are not disposed to support the assembly,” said the Marquis of Chateauneuf, who had been sent to him to bring him to a decision, “it will be quite able to defend itself without you.”  “If the assembly,” said Rohan, feeling his honor touched, “does take resolutions contrary to my advice, I shall not sever myself from the interest of our churches; “and he sacrificed his better judgment to the popular blindness.  The Dukes of La Tremoille and of Soubise, and the Marquises of La Force and of Chatillon followed suit.  As M. de Sismondi says, to these five lords and to a small number of towns was the strength reduced of the party which was defying the King of France.

Thus, since the death of Henry IV., the king and court of France were much changed:  the great questions and the great personages had disappeared.  The last of the real chiefs of the League, the brother of Duke Henry of Guise, the old Duke of Mayenne, he on whom Henry, in the hour of victory, would wreak no heavier vengeance than to walk him to a stand-still, was dead.  Henry IV.’s first wife, the sprightly and too facile Marguerite de Valois, was dead also, after consenting to descend from the throne in order to make way for the mediocre Mary de’ Medici.  The Catholic champion whom Henry IV. felicitated himself upon being able to oppose to Du Plessis-Mornay in the polemical conferences between the two communions, Cardinal de Perron, was at the point of death.  The decay was general, and the same amongst the Protestants as amongst the Catholics; Sully and Mornay held themselves aloof or were barely listened to.  In place of these eminent personages had come intriguing or ambitious subordinates, who were either innocent of or indifferent to anything like a great policy, and who had no idea beyond themselves and their fortunes.  The husband of Leonora Galigai, Concini, had amassed a great deal of money and purchased the Marquisate of Ancre; nay, more, he had been created Marshal of France, and he said to the Count of Bassompiere, “I have learned to know the world, and I am aware that a man, when he has arrived at a certain pitch of prosperity, comes down with a greater run the higher he has mounted.  When I came to France, I was not worth a son, and I owed more than eight thousand crowns.  My marriage and the queen’s kind favor has given me much advancement, office, and honor; I have worked at making